CHAPTER x.x.xIX

Dyckman telephoned to Kedzie and asked if he could see her. She said that he could, and dressed furiously while he made the distance to her apartment.

She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her two hands in his that he had serious news to bring her. She had not been awake long enough to read the papers, and this was her first death. She cried helplessly when she learned that her husband was gone away with all her bitterness for his farewell. She remembered the best of him, and he came back to her for a while as the poet who had made her his muse--the only one she could telegraph to when she returned to New York alone, her first and only husband.

She was afraid that she belittled herself in Dyckman's eyes when she let slip the remorseful Wail, "I wish I had been kinder to the poor boy!"

But she did not belittle herself in any such tendernesses of regret. She endeared herself by her grief, her self-reproach, her childish humility before the power of death. Her tears were beautiful in Jim's sight. But it is the blessing and the shame of tears that they cure the grief that causes them. At first they bleed and burn; then they flow soft and cool.

They cleanse and brighten the eyes and even wash away the cinders from the funeral smoke.

Dyckman's heart was drawn out of him toward Kedzie and his arms held her shaken body devotedly. But at length she ceased to weep, and a last long sob became dangerously like a sigh of relief. She smiled through the rain and apologized for weeping, when she should have apologized for stopping weeping. Then Dyckman's love of her seemed to withdraw backward into his heart. And his arms suddenly wearied of clasping her.

When she had seemed hardly to know that he was there he felt necessary and justified. When she took comfort in his arms and held them about her he felt ashamed, revolted, profane.

Mrs. Thropp had wept a little in sympathy with Kedzie, and Adna had looked amiably disconsolate; but by and by Mrs. Thropp was murmuring:

"After all, perhaps it was for the best. The Lord's will be done!"

Dyckman shrank as if a blasphemy had been shouted. In a hideously short time Mrs. Thropp was saying, briskly:

"Of course, honey, you've got no idea of puttin' on black for him."

"If I believed in mourning, I would," Kedzie answered without delay, "but the true mourning is in the heart."

Dyckman felt an almost uncontrollable desire to get away before he said something that might be true. He began to wonder what, after all, poor Gilfoyle had experienced from this hard-hearted little beauty. He saw that he was almost forgotten already. He thought, "How fast they go, the dead!" That same Villon had said it centuries before: "_Les morts vont vites_."

The Thropps settled down to a comfortable discussion of future plans.

One ledger had been finished. They would open a new one. Jim saw that Gilfoyle's departure had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of Kedzie's problems.

Abruptly it came to Dyckman that the solution of their problem was the beginning of a whole volume of new problems for him. He recalled that while he had become Kedzie's fiance in ignorance of his predecessor, he had rashly promised to buy off Gilfoyle as soon as he learned of him.

But death had come in like a perfect waiter and subtly removed from the banquet-table the thing that offended. Nothing had happened, however, to release Dyckman from his engagement. Gilfoyle's death ought not to have made a more important difference than his life would have made, and yet it made all the difference in the world to Dyckman's feelings.

He could not say this, however. He could not ask to be excused from his compact. His heart and his brain cried out that they did not want this merry little widow for their wife, but his lips could not frame the words. During the long silences and the evasive chatter that alternated he felt one idea in the air: "Why doesn't Mr. Dyckman offer to go on with the marriage?" Yet he could not make the offer. Nor could he make the counterclaim for a dissolving of the betrothal.

He studied the Thropp trio and pictured the ridicule and the hostility they would arouse among his family and friends--not because they were poor and simple and lowly, but because they were not honest and sweet and meek. The Dyckmans had poor relations and friends in poverty and old peasant-folk whom they loved and admired and were proud to know.

But Dyckman felt that the elder Thropps deserved to be rebuffed with sn.o.bbery because of their own sn.o.bbery. Nevertheless, he was absolutely incapable of administering discipline.

At last Mrs. Thropp grew restive, fearsome that the marriage might not take place, and desperately fearful that she might be cheated out of her visit in the spare room, at the home of the great Mrs. Dyckman. She said, grimly:

"Well, we might as well understand one another, Mr. Dyckman. You asked my daughter to marry you, didn't you?"

"Yes, Mrs. Thropp."

"Do you see anything in what's happened to prevent your getting married?"

"No, Mrs. Thropp."

"Then I don't see much use wastin' time, do you? Life's too uncertain to go postponin' happiness when it's right within your reach. Kedzie's father and I ought to be gettin' back home, and I'd feel a heap more comfortable if I could know my poor little chick was safe in the care of a good man."

The possibility of getting Mr. and Mrs. Thropp out of town soon was the one bright thought in Dyckman's mind. He felt compelled to say:

"Then let us have the ceremony, by all means. We shall have to wait awhile, I suppose, for decency's sake."

"Decency!" said Mrs. Thropp, managerially. "My Kedzie hadn't lived with the man for a long while. n.o.body but us knows that she ever did live with him. He'd abandoned her, and when he came back it was only to try to get money out of her. I can't see that she has any call to worry about decency's sake. He's done her harm enough. She can't do him any good by keepin' you waitin'."

"Just as you think best, Mrs. Thropp," said Dyckman. He began to smile in spite of himself. He was thinking how many mothers and daughters had tried to get him to the altar, not because they loved him, but because they loved his father's money and fame. Jim had dodged them all and made a kind of sport of it. And now he was cornered and captured by this old barbarian with her movie-beauty daughter who was a widow and wouldn't wear weeds.

Mrs. Thropp saw Dyckman's smile, but did not dare to ask its origin. She asked, instead:

"Would you be having a church wedding, do you think?"

"Indeed not," said Dyckman, with such incision that Mrs. Thropp felt it best not to risk a debate.

"Just a quiet wedding, then?"

"As quiet as possible, if you don't mind."

Kedzie sat speechless through all this. She wished that Jim would show more ardor for her, but she felt that he was doing fairly well not to knock her parents' heads together the way he had her husband's and his friend's. She was as eager as Jim to get rid of the elder Thropps, but she wanted to make sure of the wedding, and her mother was evidently to be trusted to bring it about. At length Jim spoke in the tone of the condemned man who says, "Well, let's hurry up and get the execution off our minds".

"I'll go and see a lawyer and make inquiries about how the marriage can be done."

He started to say to Kedzie, "You ought to know."

She started to tell him about the Marriage License Bureau in the Munic.i.p.al Building. Both recaptured silence tactfully.

He kissed Kedzie, and he had a narrow escape from being kissed by Mrs.

Thropp.

THE THIRD BOOK

MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED

CHAPTER I

In the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves for a certain decade, while a volume is not enough for a certain day. It is so with the history of persons.

In the thirty-six hours after he received Charity Coe's invitation to call Jim Dyckman pa.s.sed from being Charity's champion against her own husband to being Kedzie's champion against hers. Charity rewarded his chivalrous pommeling of Cheever by asking him never to come near her again. Kedzie rewarded his punishment of Gilfoyle by arranging that he should never leave her again.

It was Charity that he longed for, and Kedzie that he engaged to marry.